The trends worth planning around are the ones that change what a team has to maintain. Everything else is a mood board with a press release attached.
Key takeaways
- 01Motion is becoming structural rather than decorative.
- 02Type systems are narrowing, not expanding.
- 03Dark mode is a requirement rather than a feature.
- 04The interface has to work before it has to delight.
Motion that explains rather than entertains
The animation worth keeping tells you where something came from and where it went. The animation worth cutting exists because the tool made it easy. As pages get more dynamic, that distinction stops being taste and starts being usability.
- Animate to show relationships between states.
- Respect reduced-motion settings without exception.
- If the motion cannot be justified in a sentence, remove it.
Good motion answers a question the user was about to ask.
Fewer typefaces, used properly
The systems ageing best use one family across a narrow set of weights and put the effort into scale and spacing instead. It is less exciting to specify and considerably easier to hold together across a hundred screens and four teams.
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Frequently asked
The questions this piece tends to raise.